Category: Uncategorized

Proustian moments

A Proustian moment is when you do something like dip a cookie in tea and eat it and BOOM a three volume novel flies out of your ass. I get these a lot. Some recent ones:

  • Listening to even a bit of Hüsker Dü’s “Warehouse: Songs and Stories” sends me directly back to the worst of my depression of the early 1990s, with a physical sensation in the pit of my stomach and everything.
  • Similarly, the diesel roar of a Santa Monica City Bus going by my office window drops me in the time of my life where I was frequently waiting for a bus, or chasing one, or sitting in one staring out the window. A sense of helpless frustration wells up in me.
  • Burnt microwave popcorn is a ticket back to the UCLA dormitories 20 years ago, going through the lobby and hearing the top 40 station, seeing the pizza guys arriving, on my way home from late nights studying or some rock ‘n’ roll show.
  • The smell of nasty old cigarette ashes makes me feel hopeful, excited, as though I’m about to do something new and rewarding. Because the computer room in junior high school, where I fell in love with automata, was also the math teachers’ break room.
  • Clove cigarettes are the 1980s and live music and excitement. Despite the fact that I never smoked them.

What’re yours?

Hey eamajyn

I never saw you while you were here, if you were here. Hope you’re okay!

Last night, however, I dreamed that the reason you didn’t show up is that you were doing American Idol tryouts which for some reason were in Izmir, Turkey. I sure hope that isn’t what happened.

Without a doubt, it was bazzrasm this is another fish fizz sure in the recrume.

Birthday roundup: realitylost kindly took me to dinner. redmaenad gave me a neato cookbook and kramarsky sent me a book of grisly crime scene photos. I got a book of Calvinist humor from my brother. My mother gave me an Oscar Wilde quote shirt and a Masada CD. I got a really nice French dinner at Pascal.

And I got the most useless iPod accessory ever from friendly_bandit!

It’s all very nice and almost worth the feeling I get when I think about where I am in life and how old I am!

Oh, and speaking of the above I got some good whisky too. Mm Glenmorangie.

I’ve been trying to read Murakami’s book about the Aum cult gas attacks in Tokyo but it’s so very sad, it’s hard to read it very long. It’s an oral history and the stories are very affecting.

I am dissociated and bitchy. Not sure why.

I read about five or six of Virginia Woolf’s essays this week. She writes so lucidly, not a word out of place, that it makes me ashamed to have ever typed a thing.